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چکیده
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The present paper is a reading of Saul Bellow's Dangling Man, The Victim, and Seize the Day in terms of Michael White's and David Epston's notion of 'narrative therapy.' Narrative therapy is a poststructural viewpoint in psychiatry, and its ultimate goal is to reach a thick description of a person's lived experiences. Since people mainly narrate problem-saturated stories, narrative therapy aids them in deconstructing dominant narratives and reconstructing alternative ones to see events from multiple perspectives and find possible solutions to solve their problems. Saul Bellow's subtlety in his portrayal of the modern man's struggle against problems is present throughout all his novels. The existence of problems as dominators of the mind has become an integral part of his fiction. Bellow's prose implies a long-lasting tradition of story-telling to express events from distinguished perspectives. His characters, Joseph, Leventhal, and Wilhelm utilize therapeutic techniques like naming the problem, tracing its history, evaluating its effects, finding unique outcomes, and re-authoring to deconstruct totalizing stories. Bellow writes about men seemingly at the rope's end and their remaining hope to recover from past mistakes. Although some troubles are left unsolved during the deconstructing process, the protagonists arrange their problems based on their importance and externalize all of them.
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